Late one night, Dina el-Wadi, a singer and musician from Cairo, arrived in Kampala, Uganda. She'd come for a gathering of musicians who live in countries along the Nile River.

She went to bed and woke up to pure enchantment: "I found a very beautiful woman singing in the morning in a very, very, very magical way. So I said, 'Oh, who is this girl that's going to sing with us?'"

"This song's for anybody who couldn't make into this show, if there is anybody," Courtney Barnett says before blasting through "Nobody Really Cares If You Don't Go To The Party," from her just-over-the-horizon debut album, Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit. The modesty is cute but unnecessary; Barnett has the attention of many crowds at SXSW 2015, and a live show that can hold it.

Deceptive Cadence

6:42 am

Thu March 19, 2015

Arvo Pärt was saved by the bell. The Estonian composer, who turns 80 in September, hit a creative roadblock in 1968. After a hiatus of eight years he returned with a new sound inspired by the simple triad (a stack of three notes, an essential building block of Western music) and by bells. He called his new style tintinnabuli (from the Latin for bells).

When Kendrick Lamar released his major label debut in 2012, he vaulted onto pop's leaderboard as one of the best rappers of his generation. He wasn't just a skilled lyricist, but a vivid storyteller able to create scenes with vivid detail and intrigue.